Chuck Rosenthal,
one of my heroes
I know what you’re thinking, he can’t even write about local crime statistics without getting hated on, and now he thinks he’s a literary critic? Well naysayer, I’ll have you know I studied writing under Chuck Rosenthal, whose short short story “The Nicest Kid in the Universe” was anthologized in the eponymous anthology “Flash Fiction.” Anywhoo, this year’s stories are lame, and again I know what you’re thinking, no I don’t mean lame in an over-the-top shocking and offensive way. I mean lame fiction in the traditional sense.
Credit where credit’s due, however; the top three entries contain two pretty good stories, the first place entry, “The Sense of Relativity” by Tavarus Blackmon, and “Silence” by Barbara O’Donnell. “Silence” is my favorite story of the lot, but even that piece I feel is lacking something at a crucial moment. But as for the rest of the pieces, if you can get past the second place story, an extended joke (which is saying a lot for a 300 word story) about the arena, you find a list of finishers full of lame jokes, tiny plots that don’t go anywhere, and lame boy-gets-girl lines like “one thing led to another.” With only 300 words to your plot why waste them on that phrase? I would much rather read a piece that commits its 300 words to describing one thing actually leading to another, even if it was sort of raunchy.
Special acknowledgement to the SNR’s guts in awarding space to “This Number Is Not On Your Registry” by Aiesha Jones, a flight of fancy about an American dystopia in which the “Bush Rumsfeld Authority Department” outlaws international phone calls. An alternative weekly publishing that story after Rumsfeld quit his post, with only 24 months left in Bush’s term against a Democrat-controlled congress, took intestinal fortitude the likes of which our fighting men in Iraq could only dream.
The Sac Rag 